Must be the money

National park ranger.

Linguist.

Journalist.

Performing musician.

If it weren’t for the need to support myself, I would love to be any one of these things.  For all of them, unfortunately, I would have to go back to school and put myself even more deeply into debt.

With only one life to live, I must ask if it would be worth it.  With only one life to live, I’m rather terrified that the answer is “yes”.

How do we balance and accurately judge  the path of a life well-lived with security and practicality?  My (HA!) Marine posted a quote today from Ambrose Redmoon that says “Courage is not the absence of  fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.”  I think the time really has come to weigh the fear of crashing and burning against the possibility that I’ll fly.  Or find that home where my heart can finally be.

Sorry, friend

I couldn’t hear your compassionate concern for my well-being over the sound of your judging.

Perhaps I would spend time with my church “friends” if they ever invited me anywhere.  And maybe you should actually ask around before you go making judgement calls like that, so you can find I that I do spend time with church people, they just don’t happen to be you.  Or the other people I apparently “should” be hanging out with, since I can tell this is something that’s been discussed.

Perhaps you should think about the fact that maybe I hang out with “others” because they accept and love me for who I am, eccentricities and all.  Maybe I get sick of being labelled as the weird one.  Maybe I get tired of having my clothing criticized.  Or maybe I’m just sick of you and your quiet, understated, but nonetheless very, very obvious need to be a diva.

As for the assumption that the people I’m hanging out with outside of church are something bad or less, all I can is that our young people, you included, could seriously use a lesson in love and understanding from my Tuesday Night group.  And that my knitting and bad movies groups show greater acceptance for me as a person that you ever have.

Fortunately, you are not representative of everyone in our church.  I’m very glad to say that I have several wonderful, loving friends in our local congregation, and even more in the other branches.  It’s sad that I feel like I have to look outside of home, whether that be to people in other groups here in town, or people in our church in other cities, and maybe you should think about that before saying anything about how bad it is that I have so many friends outside of church.

If your the kind of “friend” I have to look forward to by sticking only to this circle, is it any wonder I’m looking elsewhere?

Today’s Secret

Even though I keep telling everyone that we’re just friends now, if you asked me out tomorrow I would say “yes” before you could finish the sentence.

(Things have been…. unbearably interesting here in NaomiLand the last few months.  I keep thinking “I have got to blog about this before my head explodes” and then not doing it.  Perhaps the people who sit in Starbucks have the right idea.  Perhaps I need to just take the lappy out of the house and to somewhere I won’t feel guilty for every second I spend typing instead of cleaning or sleeping.  Like now.)

Returning

Kind of lost sight of life there for a bit.  Or rather, some of the more important things in life.

Still want the Marine, still think we have potential, beginning to really see what the problems would be.  And they might have turned out to be irreconcilable, but that’s something it seems we’re not going to find out.

I think it is a good idea to learn how to present myself as an adult (okay, to learn to behave as an adult occasionally probably wouldn’t hurt either) but I need to remember to never lose sight of who I am and from where I have come.

I might want to be in shape, but I don’t want to become cleavage in a Facebook profile pic.  As important as a first impression may be, and in spite of the fact that “beauty” appears to rule the world, I never want to become so involved with my appearance that I forget that even if it seems like I can’t win without outdoing the next girl, it doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter if I “lose” if I don’t conform, because my world needs to be bigger than myself.  It’s not wrong to take care with how I look and what impression I make, but my whole existence has never previously revolved around whether my shoes matched my purse, and it won’t start now.

If I’m never popular, pretty or married, but I change the world in any small way for that better, that will be the better reward.  I let myself get distracted by the vanities there for a bit, but it’s time to come home.

Answer

To the questions posed in Stupid Girl, the answer is “yes.”  One of the things that is keeping the Marine from considering me as a life partner is the fact that I don’t combine the polished looks with the brains.  Not that he thinks I’m not attractive.  He told me yesterday that he thinks I’m beautiful and he would love to see what I look like gussied up.  (Which I think may be slightly more revelatory that he realizes, because I am not “beautiful.”)   It’s still a crappy thing to learn.

I’ve realized some things about my behavior in this respect, however.  One of the (several) reasons I’ve avoided getting really involved in my appearance is that I never, ever want to be that woman who outshines everyone in a room.  Or if I do, I don’t want it to be because I’m physically gorgeous.  I never want any woman to feel less because I look more.  I never want to be judged solely on how I look.  And I know these are all good goals, but I’ve pursued them not by working on making myself a better person that can navigate a relationship or social situation well enough to overtake a potential problem, but by making myself (often) as plain as possible.  Apparently, this plan has backfired, and has probably been backfiring for many years.

In response to your question…

…. asked in jest, “don’t you want to be that girl baby,” I answer “why yes, yes I do.”  Sigh.  Mixed messages, Marine, mixed messages.  I think you just don’t know what you’re sending out, but I can’t tell you how much I really would love to be the girl that makes the other girls jealous because you want to be with me.  Well, okay, I already am that girl, but only because you like dancing with me.  Otherwise you want to be with tall, leggy blondes who took advantage of their 20s to grow up rather than have a lot of fun goofing off.  That and being depressed for three years, but that’s irrelevant.

Meh.  I am the partner you are looking for.  For which you are looking.  Que buscas.  Mirame and see me.

Japan

My friend, who is 60-something and in Japan, has invited me to visit her.  She is studying there for two months, and last year at this time she was studying in Peru.  She is who I want to be when I grow up, and I so wish I had the chutzpah to do what she is suggesting and max out my credit card and go visit!!

Thoughts??

Stupid girl

Sometimes I torture myself by going to the Facebook pages of the girls who got what I (at the time) wanted and looking at their pictures and trying to figure out what they have that I don’t.  I look at their clothes, their styles, imagine (or remember) what their personalities are like, how they’re me but more.  Or less!  I look at their makeup (which they’re wearing) and their hair and accessories and how they present themselves.  And then I think “if I dressed more like that, would he love me?  If I had a stronger sense of style, would that be what it takes?”

But then I have to ask, would it matter?  Can I really ever be one of those people who changes who they are to become what someone else wants?  And I do have a partial answer. Because there are parts of me, my personality, that I’ve never really let go or explored.  And if the changes are into those areas, it wouldn’t really be changing me.  It would be becoming a different version of myself.

Honestly, though, if it involved a wholesale throwing over of myself, I couldn’t do it.  Because one day I would wake up or be standing in the line at the grocery store or be sipping a drink at a party and suddenly realize that I was a lie, and I know what happens then and it’s not pretty.  My personality is large and when it gets splashed out all over everything around it, there’s a lot that gets hit.

And so, even though I want the Marine more than I like to admit and I wish very, very much that I could figure out how to make him love me, I’m not going to compare myself to them (or her).  Because I can’t become what they are, and what I am will have to be enough for me, even if it’s never enough for anyone else again.

Life isn’t fair, but sometimes it’s beautiful, and I have to find my home in that beauty rather than destroy my happiness by warping who I am.

Lost the game

I think I may have lost.  I think I may have fallen in love, and my only hope is that something will happen in the next week to show me otherwise.  I know I keep writing about this, but it keeps being an issue.

I’m pretty sure that the Marine is wholeheartedly fighting against falling for me, and it runs completely contrary to the fairytale.  I’ve spent years wrestling with the idea that we’re lied to by literature, music and theater of all kinds when it comes to love and fate, but seeing it once again acted out in my own life is miserable.

If I can keep just enough distance between us to hold off falling apart when he leaves, I’m happy.  I’ll trade some misery for the time I’ll get to have with him, but I’m not willing to trade another breakdown.  Okay, okay, near breakdown.  Either way, it wouldn’t be worth losing that much time again.  I just wish I could actually give him the kind of support and friendship I have the feeling he might need.

Dear Kyle:  I’m right here.  Come on, give me a shot.

Dear Universe: You continue to suck.

Dear Self:  Disaster loometh.  Save yourself.

Outsider

It’s strange to suddenly realize you don’t belong where you always had your place.  I mean, really don’t belong.